The Hustle’s business newsletter spent a chunk of this week’s issue on the romance bookstore boom — more than 230 new shops in three years — and traced it back to one origin story: Bea and Leah Koch raising $90,000 on Kickstarter in 2016 to open the first one, The Ripped Bodice.
Romance has been running the self-published playbook for a decade now: BookTok audiences, reader-built demand, authors who never needed a gatekeeper’s permission. Now that audience is funding its own retail infrastructure too. What would your own readers build for you, if you just asked them to?
